Electronic conferencing has long held the promise of enhancing collaboration, reducing travel requirements, and generally aiding the convenient and timely conferencing of potentially large work groups. Non-limiting examples of electronic conferencing include video conferencing and web conferencing and it should be noted that electronic conferencing is sometimes referred to as “e-conferencing.”
Both private networks, such as the typically closed “enterprise” networks managed by corporate entities, and public networks, such as the various Public Land Mobile Networks (PLMNs) nowadays available, have evolved to a point where high-quality electronic conferencing has become an integral business and research tool. Challenges remain, however, with respect to supporting and managing potentially large electronic conferences within enterprise networks and other networks that act as “host” networks.
Imagine a typical large corporation and its corresponding enterprise network. The corporation may use one or more “conference servers,” each acting as conference controller or management hub, and each able to host one or more potentially large electronic conferences. As the central hub for each conference, the conference server requires a certain amount of host network capacity—e.g., for each ongoing conference, the conferencing server requires a given and perhaps dynamically changing amount of the overall bandwidth capacity of the host network.
The aggregate resource “footprint” for a given electronic conference depends on the number of conference participants, referred to herein as “clients,” and on the bandwidths of their respective source and conference streams. Here, a “client” is an electronic device participating in the electronic conference. In general, each client contributes a source stream that is received at the conferencing server, and receives a conference stream from the conferencing server. The conference stream sent to a given client generally comprises selected source streams from one or more other clients, possibly with modifications applied by the conferencing server (such as mixing, multiplexing, conversion, reformatting, etc.).
The conference stream sent to any particular client will generally depend on the selections and preferences of that conferee. Two clients having comparable conference settings, capabilities and network connections may receive the same or substantially the same conference stream—e.g., same bitrate or quality, and the same content. On the other hand, two clients with different conference settings, capabilities, or network connections may receive substantially different conference streams. Compare, for example, the conference stream sent to a remote high-definition (HD) video conferencing system having a high bandwidth Internet connection to the host network versus the conference stream sent to a remote mobile phone that has a low resolution display screen and is connected through a cellular communication network that offers limited and changing connection bandwidths and suffers from typical radio link data losses.